US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has appointed Nate Hochman, a former Ron DeSantis speechwriter, to a senior State Department role, despite Hochman having been sacked from the DeSantis 2024 presidential campaign in 2023 over a video controversy linked to white supremacist imagery. Hochman now serves as deputy director of the department's policy planning office and as Rubio's chief speechwriter, a rehabilitation that has drawn scrutiny given the circumstances of his earlier dismissal and separate reports of him engaging sympathetically with a prominent white nationalist figure.

Hochman lost his DeSantis job after resharing a video that ended with the Florida state seal morphing into a Sonnenrad, a symbol the Anti-Defamation League classifies as neo-Nazi; he denied making the video and deleted the repost once he learned its meaning, and a later New Republic report found DeSantis campaign staff had actually created and seeded it. He also faced criticism over a recorded conversation with white nationalist Nick Fuentes, in which he told Fuentes he had "gotten a lot of kids based", though Hochman said he was trying to draw Fuentes out rather than agreeing with him. After stints at America 2100 and as an adviser to Senator Eric Schmitt, he joined the State Department, which has defended him as "a trusted and key member" advancing Rubio's foreign policy agenda.